Lithograph by W. Simpson from 1859 depicting British officers travelling in panniers on the backs of camels as well as in sedan chairs carried by Indian men.
Lithograph by W. Simpson from 1859 depicting British officers travelling in panniers on the backs of camels as well as in sedan chairs carried by Indian men.
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A statistic has been circulating widely online, and is invoked with great confidence in political speeches, social media debates, and nationalist discourse. It goes something like this: India accounted for roughly 32 percent of world’s gross domestic product in 1 CE and as much as 24.4 percent in 1700, yet by 1947, when British rule ended, that share had collapsed to just 4 percent. (more…)